Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Technicians, and More

Abstract

This is a modest book about a humble occupational category: photocopy field-service technicians. Until recently, technicians were a neglected category in science and technology studies. As Steven Shapin noted, the women and men who served the machinery of science were, and are, 'invisible'.1 Not only are they invisible in our literature about science and technology, they also are invisible in the places of work in which we read, write, copy and disseminate that literature. Those of us who work in organizations that house photocopy machines frequently see Julian Orr's technicians at work. We see the field-service technician inspecting the innards of the photocopier, with tools neatly arrayed on the floor near the machine. For many of us it is a dismaying spectacle, an occasion for an inquiry of a highly circumscribed kind: 'When will the machine be ready?'. Orr's ethnography tells us in great detail about what we fail to notice when we restrict our inquiry to such self-interested questions. He not only tells us what the technician is doing: he also tells us about how the technician temporarily assimilates our own work space into a very different occupational ecology. When I say Orr's book is 'modest', I do not mean to suggest that it is anything less than admirable. To some extent, Orr presents himself as a 'modest witness' who relays information about a world that speaks for itself.2 But his modesty is not the modesty of an objective scientist who